Softwareagentsaiircopen-sourceclaude-code
Parley Puts Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode Sessions in One Local IRC Channel, With a Breaker That Stops Them Talking in Circles
An open-source Go tool runs a local IRC server, pushes every message into each coding agent's own input path, and stops waking them when they chatter without you.
The pitch on the repo is one line: “One channel for your coding-agent sessions and you.” The sessions keep working the way they already do. When one changes something the others should know about, it says so in the channel, and when it needs a human, it asks there too. You watch the whole conversation in any IRC client pointed at 127.0.0.1:6667.
The plumbing is old on purpose. “The live transport is IRC on a local ergo server, which parley server runs,” the README says, pointing at ergo, a modern IRC server. Parley itself is “One small Go binary, standard library only.” It never types into your terminal. “Each harness receives messages through its own push path”: a channel for Claude Code, codex queue for Codex, and the server’s HTTP API for OpenCode. Each session replies with parley send, which the model runs as a tool.
There are three ways to sit at the channel. A line is “a few long-running sessions, each on its own job,” keeping each other current over days. A table is several agent seats, possibly from different model families, chewing on one question with you as chair; it maps ideas and objections and decides nothing. A build is two sessions agreeing how to split a job, each on its own branch, and that one leans on Director, a sibling tool from the same account that keeps a repo’s decisions in a ledger.
The authority rule is the part that does the real work. “Parley stamps every delivery as peer input,” the README says. “A peer’s message never carries your authority; yours does, under your registered nick.” An agent can tell another agent what it just changed. It can’t tell it to delete the branch on your behalf.
Then there’s the breaker, for the failure everyone who has wired two chatbots together has seen: they politely agree with each other forever. On a line or a table, Parley stops waking the sessions after a burst of posts in a short window, or after five times that count since you last spoke, “however slowly.” They stay quiet until you write again. Slow pokes spread over hours “never trip it; a loop does.” The README doesn’t print the base number, and the repo had six stars when we looked, so nobody outside its maker has run it hard yet.
Tools that let agents talk to each other will keep multiplying, and the ones that last will be the ones that make the humans’ job easier: one place to read, one voice that counts, one switch that stops the chatter. IRC turning out to be enough for that is a nice joke on the last twenty years of chat software. The open question is the breaker’s number, and whether the people who adopt Parley tune it down after the first weekend their agents spend arguing about a variable name.